Deglazing / cleaning brake discs?

[A_morti]

I'm pretty sure the front brake discs on FAZ600 are contaminated with oil or grease, or glazed, or both.

Any tips for cleaning them? So far my plan would be to remove the wheel, remove the discs, clean with a brush and soapy warder, scrub with some scotchbrite (brown?) If I can find it locally or otherwise a washing up sponge, then douse with brake clean and an old towel.

Should work, but seems like hard work. Just not convinced you can do a good job cleaning out the drilled holes without splashing the whole bike in brake dust and brake clean, if you don't remove the discs first?

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

I'd try cleaning them with brake cleaner first, don't bother taking them off the bike, give them a good clean with brake cleaner and see if it improves the brakes.
Has it got the original discs on it, my FZ 750 had pattern disc fitted when I got it and they were terrible for getting contaminated with brake dust, I had to clean them every time I used the bike, I fitted some second hand oe ones and this got rid of the problem.

[The Spin Doctor]

I'm pretty sure the front brake discs on FAZ600 are contaminated with oil or grease, or glazed, or both.

Any tips for cleaning them? So far my plan would be to remove the wheel, remove the discs, clean with a brush and soapy warder, scrub with some scotchbrite (brown?) If I can find it locally or otherwise a washing up sponge, then douse with brake clean and an old towel.

Should work, but seems like hard work. Just not convinced you can do a good job cleaning out the drilled holes without splashing the whole bike in brake dust and brake clean, if you don't remove the discs first?

Spend a LOT of time cleaning the holes out. My XJ rather bizarrely dribbled oil out of a fork whilst it was parked up a couple of Februarys back (I can only assume it was the change of air pressure thanks to a warm day and a freezing night) and whilst cleaning the fork leg and caliper was easy enough, getting all the residual oil out of the holes took forever... I ended up using a small bottle brush and yards of a tough cleaning cloth from Wickes, soaking the cloth with brake cleaner, then pushing it into the hole wrapped around the bottle brush and rotating it several times...

...and repeat.

Don't forget your pads may be contaminated too.

Which reminds me... annual brake piston service required.

[A_morti]

I'd try cleaning them with brake cleaner first, don't bother taking them off the bike, give them a good clean with brake cleaner and see if it improves the brakes.
Has it got the original discs on it, my FZ 750 had pattern disc fitted when I got it and they were terrible for getting contaminated with brake dust, I had to clean them every time I used the bike, I fitted some second hand oe ones and this got rid of the problem.

I did already give it a good try on the bike with brake cleaner and an old towel. There was plenty of dirt coming up including some looked a bit greasy. I kept going til I ran out of brake clean. The rag was coming back more or less clean by then.
Discs are original parts, under 9k miles on them since 2004.

[A_morti]

I'm pretty sure the front brake discs on FAZ600 are contaminated with oil or grease, or glazed, or both.

Any tips for cleaning them? So far my plan would be to remove the wheel, remove the discs, clean with a brush and soapy warder, scrub with some scotchbrite (brown?) If I can find it locally or otherwise a washing up sponge, then douse with brake clean and an old towel.

Should work, but seems like hard work. Just not convinced you can do a good job cleaning out the drilled holes without splashing the whole bike in brake dust and brake clean, if you don't remove the discs first?

Spend a LOT of time cleaning the holes out. My XJ rather bizarrely dribbled oil out of a fork whilst it was parked up a couple of Februarys back (I can only assume it was the change of air pressure thanks to a warm day and a freezing night) and whilst cleaning the fork leg and caliper was easy enough, getting all the residual oil out of the holes took forever... I ended up using a small bottle brush and yards of a tough cleaning cloth from Wickes, soaking the cloth with brake cleaner, then pushing it into the hole wrapped around the bottle brush and rotating it several times...

...and repeat.

Don't forget your pads may be contaminated too.

Which reminds me... annual brake piston service required.

Bottle brush sounds like a good idea. I'll raid my kid's crafts supplies for large diameter pipe cleaner

The pads look ok to me. I did deglaze and clean them. Can oil soak into that material, is it porous?

The pistons on mine already got a clean up, they were dirty but cleaned up like brand new.

[A_morti]

Seems pads are porous, so it could be that there's oil in the material.
Any value in heating them up to burn the oil off? I have an induction cooker that heats up anything ferric pretty hot, pretty quick.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Pads are usually sintered (even if they're not sold as "sintered") and hence can contain loads of tiny cavities. The disc can also pick up all kinds of semi-baked-on crap.

I'd probably have done the far more bodgey method. Ride along dragging the brake until they stink But not until they're glazed of course.

[weeksy]

Seems pads are porous, so it could be that there's oil in the material.
Any value in heating them up to burn the oil off? I have an induction cooker that heats up anything ferric pretty hot, pretty quick.

Quite common in bicycles to either put in oven or even boiling/hot water.

Personally, i throw them in the bin... If it was a motorbike and it wanted it to stop me, i'd have new pads

[A_morti]

NGL, I did a bit of that this morning!
Trouble is, there's nowhere on Malta that you can really crack the throttle wide or long enough to get a whole lot of heat into the brakes, plus that seems unlikely to clean out the holes.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Personally, i throw them in the bin... If it was a motorbike and it wanted it to stop me, i'd have new pads

I mean the man has a point, how much do pads cost?

Discs are a bit spendy I'll grant you.

[A_morti]

OEM pads are 40€ a side, plus shipping from an actual country to my tiny island. Not sure about aftermarket.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

If you're in any doubt about the pads, bin them, I contaminated some with oil once, cleaned them, they worked fine in the dry, didn't work at all in the wet.

[weeksy]

OEM pads are 40€ a side, plus shipping from an actual country to my tiny island. Not sure about aftermarket.

SBS Street Excel...

Does it matter how much they are at 80mph>0mph ?

[Mr. Dazzle]

The binders and polymers used in the pads will also absorb fluids over time too, so even if they're "clean" you can have stuff hiding in them.

[Yorick]

On my Husky TE300i the pads and disks kept glazing up.
Orbital grinder on the disk got the glaze off.
Then push pads onto sander surface. If no sander, run the pads on a breeze block or brick.

I did the breeze block trick on all my GSXR1000 front pads every few months.

[A_morti]

Does it matter how much they are at 80mph>0mph ?

Absolutely valid point, but on Malta the highest speed limit anywhere is 80kmh, and it would be a rare day for me to exceed that.

I'll give it another go at rescuing what I have, but I'll keep that brand in mind.

[weeksy]

Does it matter how much they are at 80mph>0mph ?

Absolutely valid point, but on Malta the highest speed limit anywhere is 80kmh, and it would be a rare day for me to exceed that.

I'll give it another go at rescuing what I have, but I'll keep that brand in mind.

Ah that's ok then.. it doesn't hurt when you plough into something at 50mph

[dern]

If there are visible dark marks on the discs I'd take them off the wheel and use something like scotch pads to clean the deposits off. Degrease thoroughly following the advice from others about cleaning out the holes and flushing out around the bobbins. You should definitely remove the discs to do this. If there was any danger of contamination I'd chuck the pads, put some new ones in and get them nice and hot bedding them in.

[The Spin Doctor]

Which reminds me... annual brake piston service required.

The pistons on mine already got a clean up, they were dirty but cleaned up like brand new.

I meant I needed to do mine... MOT tomorrow.

I usually do them annually. But I suspect the last time they got cleaned was actually 2017. 2018 I was in New Zealand in Feb / Mar and got the bike MOT'd in a rush when I got back, ditto 2019. 2020 was COVID - I'd just got the bike out for the first course of the year when we went into lockdown. I don't recall doing them then though I did change the rear pads for the MOT that year. 2021 was another slow start after another lockdown, then 2022 I had a dodgy back and couldn't bend down.

Result? One sliding front caliper was totally non-sliding. Took a couple of hours to clean that up properly. The other one, rather oddly, was fine - just needed a bit of baked on dust removed from the pistons and a general clean up. The rear was a bit mucky but took me 45 mins to remember how to put it back together. There's a spring which always drops out when the caliper's split and I forgot it. I wondered why the pads were falling out when I tried to put it all back together - I found it hiding under the tyre.